


Sufficiently advanced technology

by Anonymous



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), To Be A Machine - Mark O'Connell (book)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Transhumanism, Crack Treated Seriously, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-04
Updated: 2017-05-04
Packaged: 2018-12-22 12:17:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11967213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: But it wasn't all rumors.  Talk to anyone who's been in the transhumanist community long enough, and they'd tell you about the one with the experimental eyes or the one who, steampunk-like, seems to have fused himself to a barrel.  They would also tell you that the Knights of Ren were banned from attending conferences during the summer of 2007, when Kylo Ren made his debut by getting into an argument with a fellow panelist, which culminated in him flipping over the table, and, or so the story went, one of his followers setting a fire in the middle of the audience.  (They never found the follower in the security footage, though.)





	Sufficiently advanced technology

**Author's Note:**

> I am reading _To Be a Machine_ , and at one point there is a person who tells Mark O'Connell that he is saving himself for the sexbots, and that made me think of Hux (possibly because of _Ex Machina_ , possibly because, you know, Hux), and of how badly Kylo Ren wants to replace at least one limb with a robolimb so he can be closer to Anakin. And thus this AU.

Two days after sneaking out with a stolen bible from the church of the machine, I got a response to an email I'd sent weeks ago to another quasi-religious organization--one that, from what I'd heard, was smaller and weirder. One that might not exist anymore, or one that might have never existed, except in dead threads on old messageboards. I'd nearly forgotten about it until the reply came in all lowercase letters, just a day and an address and a "ps no pix pls." 

It wasn't a particularly promising lead, but the date was before my flight left and the rumors were wild enough that I half-wanted to dispel them for my own peace of mind. I wrote back saying I would meet the Knights on the appointed day, and asking if they had any objections to the interview being recorded. 

This time the reply was almost instantaneous: no, that was okay, and something about hix(?).

It didn't match anything I'd heard about the Knights of Ren, and that almost intrigued me more than the wild tales of extreme body modification, mandatory Faraday cage meditations, and nanobots--and also the rumors that none of that was true, that it was all a bunch of lies invented by some teenager in his parents' basement, fueled by pulpy scifi and sugary energy drinks.

But it wasn't all rumors. Talk to anyone who's been in the transhumanist community long enough, and they'd tell you about the one with the experimental eyes or the one who, steampunk-like, seems to have fused himself to a barrel. They would also tell you that the Knights of Ren were banned from attending conferences during the summer of 2007, when Kylo Ren made his debut by getting into an argument with a fellow panelist, which culminated in him flipping over the table, and, or so the story went, one of his followers setting a fire in the middle of the audience. (They never found the follower in the security footage, though.)

No one had heard from the Knights of Ren since, and apart from a few grainy clips on Youtube and increasingly obscure hearsay, it was like they didn't exist--but since one of those bits of hearsay was that the Knights were actually a secret DARPA program started under the Bush administration, and that some of the Knights were former Blackwater employees, that they had access to the latest prosthetics and swapped out parts of their bodies as fast as someone with too much money went through new Apple products, it was worth seeing if any of that was true--and what could lead to someone being cast out from an almost absurdly tolerant and forgiving community. After all, it had only been one table, and one fire--at least as far as I knew.

So here I was, about to pay a visit to the dark side of transhumanism.

-

The address I'd been given turned out to be way out in the outer Richmond. It was near the VA hospital, which lent some credence to the DARPA rumor, but, more importantly, it was nowhere near a BART stop, and Uber was undergoing surge pricing for what seemed like the twentieth time this trip, so I bravely climbed aboard a bus and, forty-five minutes later, gratefully disembarked. The fog had rolled in, or perhaps it had never left, and I shivered a little at the damp and the cold and the way that out here the day seemed darker, the colors less bright.

I'm not going to describe the house too thoroughly, because the Knights, or at least Kylo Ren and his roommates, don't want visitors, and I don't want--whatever the Knights might do to me if I led a bunch of angry transhumanists to their door. But it was a surprisingly normal house. It didn't look all that different from any other house on the street. It wasn't exceptionally well-kept, or run-down, or weirdly painted. There was a Giants flag stuck in the upstairs window. I wondered, as I knocked on the door, if the address had been a typo, or the email not from Kylo Ren at all.

I didn't have to wonder for long. When Kylo Ren opened the door, he was dressed all in black, with what looked like a modified motorcycle helmet and suspenders and possibly a crop top among his many layers, but this was San Francisco, so he was only the fifth strangest thing I'd seen today. Still, I found myself getting excited: I hadn't met too many people in the movement who'd had extensive modifications like the Knights of Ren were famous for, and Kylo looked like he was already halfway to being a machine. He acted like one too, saying, very stiffly, "You're the journalist?" Then he didn't shake my hand, just turned around and led me into the living room of the house.

The living room was very state of the art and high tech, but it wasn't a cybernetics workshop. It was a gym. A tall blonde woman was bench-pressing what looked like twice my weight in one corner, but stopped when she saw me. Captain Phasma (not her real name) wiped her hands off on a towel before shaking mine and saying, "Thank you for coming."

"Thanks for inviting me," I said, trying not to stare at the helmet, the costume, but staring at Phasma struck me as equally awkward, given her workout clothes were cut-offs and a sports bra, and both were damp with sweat. There wasn't much else to look at, though, apart from the elliptical, the punching bag, the weight bench.

"Not what you expected, is it?" she said wryly, in a way that made me think she'd been similarly disillusioned, but that seemed to set Ren's shoulders back. I wasn't staring at him, but I could still see him in the corner of my eye, his posture reading tense and insulted.

"I've been researching this topic for quite some time. I'm not entirely sure what to expect anymore."

She didn't seem fooled, and nor did her leader. He made a sound like a machine expelling exhaust, and I couldn't help but turn to him, see if that was hydraulics, but nope, it was your garden-variety aggrieved teenager sigh, an _oh god, I can't believe I'm listening to this_ sigh being expelled by lungs that were probably professional athlete quality, if his size and the home gym set-up were anything to go by. He was also removing the headgear, and underneath it he was almost disappointingly human, although I thought, maybe a little uncharitably, that if I looked like him I'd consider wearing a silly helmet and mask around all the time too.

"You're lying," he said, with typical teenage gracelessness. "You think I am a disappointment. You are thinking I might be no great loss to the movement after all."

"He's a reporter, Ren," said a third person I hadn't noticed, maybe because he was sitting in the shadow of the treadmill, up against the wall. "Not your therapist."

Phasma and Kylo belonged to the subset of transhumanists whose quest for self-improvement also turned them into gym rats, or, in their cases, gym ROUS. This third person did not. He was weedy, and pale enough to make you suspect he had a personal vendetta against the sun. The way he squinted at his laptop only reinforced that impression. 

I waited for him to introduce himself, but he kept typing away, so I turned back to Kylo Ren. "The Knights have a reputation for technological modifications, and I thought that, beneath the helmet...."

His scowl was darkening, deepening. I was essentially telling him that, yes, I was disappointed that I didn't see any mechanical eyes or implants, but it was as much my fault for what I expected as his for not conforming to my expectations.

"He doesn't have any modifications," said the third person, still not looking up from his laptop. "He's waiting for sufficiently advanced technology." He said this with kind of a sneer that cemented my belief he was kind of an asshole.

"Midichlorians are real," said Kylo, an ugly flush suffusing his face.

"Come on," said Phasma, grabbing Kylo by the shoulder, and glancing back at me. "I need a shower, so you get to offer our guest coffee or tea, or whatever we have in the fridge."

"Sorry," said the third person. I couldn't see his face, but I could tell he was sneering. "No motor oil here."

"We have kombucha," said Kylo Ren. I wasn't all that sure how that was different, and then he added, "I make it myself."

-

The kitchen was a little more familiar to me, the usual mess of unattached not-quite adults rooming together. There was a bowl of fruit on the table that was down to a wrinkled-looking apple, spotty banana and a lot of tangerines. A couple of bottles of different brands of vodka sat on the counter, and the microwave clearly cooked more food than the stove, which seemed to function mainly as an ersatz drying rack. 

The glasses Kylo Ren pulled from the cupboard looked clean enough, and then he stooped over the fridge and frowned. 

"We're out of kombucha," he said ominously. "Hux must have--" his face twisted and I didn't think the rest of that sentence was going to be "drank it himself." It wasn't. "--thrown it out. He doesn't believe in fermentation. Says it's not sterile." He got his breathing under control. "We have orange juice."

"Orange juice will do," I told him, trying to keep the relief out of my face and voice. I thought I succeeded but he still glowered at me. Although it was possible that was all in my head, because glower seemed to be his default expression. 

"So," I said, taking a sip of the orange juice, "I'm really interested in knowing what drew you to transhumanism." 

I thought I knew the answer, or at least part of it. Kylo had terrible posture. He bowed his shoulders, as if apologetic for taking up so much space, and curled in on himself. I'd never seen someone look so ill at ease in their own body, and it wasn't a stretch to think that what Kylo really wanted was to improve himself into earning someone else's approval, because he felt like he didn't have it now. And that might be an additional reason why he didn't fit in with the transhumanist community as I'd seen them: for people who put strange things under their skin, and cryogenically freeze other people's heads, and drive around in giant coffin busses, they were still a relatively well-adjusted lot, and Kylo Ren was not.

So I was surprised when he knocked back half his glass, grimaced like it left a bad taste in his mouth, looked at me--straight at me--and said, "My grandfather was a triple amputee."

"Oh," I said. "I'm sorry--"

"That," said Kylo Ren, and his voice took on strength and conviction, "is why I'm 'into' this. He was a triple amputee, and he had to use prosthetics since his early twenties, but that didn't stop him from achieving great things. Being a machine--being even part machine--doesn't make you any less human."

I had to admit I was deeply impressed. He wasn't the first transhumanist to make a disability rights case for the movement, but the other two had been quiet and thoughtful and women. Maybe I had judged him a little too hastily. Maybe Kylo Ren had hidden depths. 

Back at my Airbnb I did a little digging and discovered Kylo Ren's real name. (The house he lived in belonged to his parents. He was between jobs according to LinkedIn, but was certified as both a yoga and MMA trainer.) And from there it wasn't hard to find out that his triple amputee grandfather had been a notorious war criminal. 

Maybe it was best if Kylo Ren's hidden depths stayed hidden. 

-

Kylo Ren didn't tell me any more about his grandfather, except to go into the history of his own discovery of transhumanism. He was thirteen or fourteen at the time and had run into a community that would later become the Knights of Ren but were at the time just a chat group on AOL. 

To keep from pointing out that he'd sent pictures of his teenaged torso to an unnamed man over the internet, I started to talk about how technology really had changed, from dial-up to DSL, but then the snotty redhead from the front room-slash-gym came into the kitchen. 

Kylo Ren gulped down the rest of his orange juice and poured himself a new glass. 

The other man glanced up from his computer to the orange juice carton, which was now empty. Kylo crossed his massive arms over his massive chest, and introduced the newcomer as Armitage Hux (actually his real name, which made me feel sorry for him for approximately thirty seconds). The kombucha dumper and, I presumed, the actual owner of the orange juice. 

"He's also a transhumanist," said Kylo. Which, given the amount of disdain he had for his roommate, surprised me, but then the Knights of Ren were hardly what I'd expected--although Hux wasn't a knight. He made that clear, right off, with another sneer and a "yes, but I'm not one of them."

"That's what I assumed," I said. "You're not dressed like one."

He rolled his eyes, but I'm not sure people under forty who are dressed in khakis and polo shirts get to cast the first stones. In fact, I don't think they're even in the stone-throwing line. 

In addition to the lack of fashion sense, Hux also didn't have any modifications that I could see, and when I asked him about that, he (still typing) told me he was more into the programming side of things.

"Oh," I said. It wasn't that there hadn't been a fair number of coders among the transhumanists I'd met so far, but none of them had seemed that dismissive of the idea that they might one day be a machine--or, in their terms, a machine made of more than meat. "So what do you work on? Artificial intelligence? Machine learning?"

"I find flaws," he said. "Vulnerabilities. If people's refrigerators can be hacked, then certainly whatever they'll put under their skins and into their brains can, and yet no one seems to consider this. They're all too busy being dazzled by the latest technologies."

"I consider it," Kylo said.

"Would it have even occurred to you if I hadn't told you about it?" I corrected my earlier assumption: Hux wasn't kind of an asshole. He was a total asshole.

"Yes," sulked Kylo. "Do you think I want some random person getting into my head and making me--making me think--making me do--"

I cleared my throat and dove back into the conversation. I was fairly sure they'd had this argument before anyway. "So you're doing security work," I said to Hux, thinking of all those people putting devices into themselves with all the abandon of your seventy-eight-year-old uncle opening emails from Nigerian princes, and feeling grateful despite myself that someone was looking out for them, even if he was an asshole.

Hux stared at me for a long, unsettling time. "Yes," he said. "Security."

-

The interview limped along awkwardly for another few minutes before Phasma came back in the room. 

She didn't have any implants that I could see either, but she did have a lot of piercings up and down her earlobes. She glanced at the orange juice and Kylo's posture and I think I saw her trying not to roll her eyes. 

"Are you also a transhumanist?" I asked her. 

"We're all transhumanists here," she said, reaching into the fridge and pulling out a can of beer. "Want one?"

I did, but I indicated my orange juice. "I'm good, thanks."

Phasma cracked the beer and sat down next to me. As Kylo and Hux got into an increasingly esoteric argument about some person or program called Snoke, she explained that she was one of Hux's old coworkers from Twitter. (He'd been part of the hate speech team but had since moved on to Uber.) Interest in transhumanism was fairly high in Silicon Valley, but Hux was the first real fanatic about it she'd ever met. 

"And he converted you?" It was hard to not sound skeptical. 

"Not really," she admitted. Hux paused long enough in enumerating Kylo's failings to shoot her a glare, which she shrugged off. "The idea of never growing old, never wearing out, that sort of thing, does. And then there's the AI part."

"Skynet," said Kylo glumly. 

I was certain they were joking, but neither of them joined me when I laughed, and Hux glared down his nose at Kylo (who was slightly taller than him, but slouched over in his seat so much that it wasn't even a stretch) and said he was being an idiot, believing that mystical Cal mumbojumbo.

"You think those were mechanical errors?" said Kylo dangerously. "Simple mechanical errors over and over again? These things happen for a reason--"

A vein bulged in Hix's neck. Phasma grabbed her beer and my arm and dragged me back into the living room as Kylo started shouting that he'd show Hux mechanical errors and ripped his laptop in two with his bare hands.

I stared as the halves of the laptop actually bounced off the floor, stray keys clattering after. 

Phasma sighed and said they got like this sometimes, and then, "It might be best if you leave."

She was probably right. I hadn't addressed most of the fascinating rumors about the Knights of Ren, but their leader had just confused the _Terminator_ franchise with reality, for god's sake. And Hux was a deeply unpleasant and, as far as I could tell, deeply unimportant little man. (For what it's worth, I haven't had a day without surge pricing when I've tried to catch an Uber since meeting him.)

Phasma showed me out. I thanked her. She said to think nothing of it and kept drinking her beer like Kylo's property damage and Hux's emotional abuse were normal occurrences for her, which they probably were. Halfway down the steps, I heard her say, "Wait."

I did. Then I turned and jogged back up the stairs. 

She sighed, looked around, and lowered her voice. "Look, you asked me why I'm a transhumanist, and, yeah, I believe in self-improvement and all that, but to be honest, I stick around because if these nutters get hold of technological super strength, I'm going to need the same upgrades so I can stop them."

I stared at her for a second, then shook her hand again. "Thank you," I told her. And then, more quietly, more urgently, "Thank you."


End file.
